Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Organizing, organizing, organizing...

Seems that that is all I do these days but it's a necessary evil. Our apartment is such that we don't have a lot of extra storage space. We have a storage unit in the basement but it's prone to flooding (all it takes is a good rainstorm and the drains getting backed up and we have water in the streets, over the sidewalk, and down into the basement) which is not good if you want to store things like winter clothes. We have a closet in the living room that's very small. We have kitchen cabinet space but no pantry (and therefore, no place to store things like broom/vacuum cleaner/etc). There's no linen closet (or if there was, the room has been taken up by the water heater). Bathroom storage is minimum, only a small cabinet under the sink. The three bedrooms each have a closet but the closets are all different sizes. One room has a large closet and the other two rooms have smaller closets (including the largest bedroom, ask me how that makes ANY sense at all!). They do all at least have a shelf. It's just an awkwardly put together apartment where the space is not set up in the best way.

To add to that, I have two kids which means toys and clothes galore. I have totes of clothes that Natalie grew out of and Isabelle still needs to grow into. My younger sister is also using some of the clothes for her youngest daughter who will be 3 next week. Since it took so long for Isabelle to grow, I have clothes from 0-3 months all the way to size 8 girls. That's a lot of clothes! And that doesn't include the fact that I have about three totes in size 24 months and 2T alone that I ended up getting shortly after Isabelle was born. I look forward to her reaching that size because I'll have plenty of clothes for her to wear!

Then we have the toys. We have a lots of toys for various ages and neither girl is good at putting away toys. Along with the toys, we have stuffed animals. And getting rid of excess toys has not been easy whatsoever. Heaven help me if I end up pregnant with another child, I may go mad!

I am not the most organized person in the world. I try to be but a lot of things end up in boxes and forgotten about for years and years. It's part of that pack rat trait I picked up from my dad. He was notorious at having stuff in boxes and moving it all with him from place to place to place and filling up and entire garage, extra room, storage unit, you name it. I'm trying not to do that. Going to Korea, we got rid of a LOT of stuff. However, it's amazing how easy it is to end up with a lot of stuff again, especially when you have a friend who is moving and needs to get rid of a bunch of HER stuff! lol Of course, winning a lot of Carebears on eBay probably didn't help matters either... My husband is even worse with the organizing than I am. He doesn't organize or if he does, it's in the most illogical way. He also doesn't remember where he puts stuff which means that if he put something away, I may never see it again. Sometimes this has meant tearing the house apart until what I'm looking for. Not the most logical course of action but he truly does not get that he needs to REMEMBER where he put something!

So, I have a room that I use for an office. It's also where a lot of stuff ends up, sort of the sorting/processing area of the apartment. This way, it's in "holding" and it's SAFE from my husband putting it away. Unfortunately, it means that it may end up being in holding for sometime as getting to it and organizing it is rather time consuming (especially when I have two hurricanes to pick up after--three if you count my husband!).

The key, I realize, is minimizing what is accessible to the girls. The less they have access to, the easier it is to keep up with the daily messes. It's not easy though because they both have gotten into the extra totes and have dragged toys out, sometimes emptying entire totes at once. Argh!

So I'm slowly working on my office and trying to get it organized and have things in it that are functional. I realize that the girls having bookshelves is just pointless. The books never end up in there so one went into my office and the other into our bedroom. Books we don't want Isabelle to get into (because they're paper books and can be torn) will be in our room and board books will have a home in either the living room or bedroom/playroom. I would like to get one of those bookshelves for them that leaves the books facing out but they're not cheap and the cheap ones, I guess, are too prone to ripping. Maybe were baskets and command hooks? Might be something to look into at some point.

In the meantime, I'm just plugging away, trying to get things organized and put away. It's a huge task because I'm the one doing pretty much all of the work (definitely can't rely on my husband to be much help) and it's a lot of stuff to organize but my plan is to find a place for everything. And hopefully, by the time we move out of this apartment, I will have done that. It's just going to take time.

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About Me

I'm a 34 year old freethinking mom of two rambunctious girls. I am homeschooling my third grader which has been a challenge in and of itself especially since I also have a preschooler to keep out of trouble! I'm married to my polar opposite as far as religious beliefs goes which makes things quite interesting. I have also finished my first year as a student at the local technical college majoring as a Computer Support Specialist. It's never a dull moment around here, that's for sure!